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by Elizabeth McGovern, directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel

Mirvish Productions presents Karl Sydow’s production, CAA Theatre, 651 Yonge Street, Toronto

November 9-30, 2025

Ava: “They took away my voice”

The overriding reason to see Ava: The Secret Conversations is to see Elizabeth McGovern on stage. People will likely have seen McGovern playing Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham, for five seasons on Downton Abbey and in the three subsequent Downton films. Ava gives audiences a chance not only to see McGovern in person but to realize that she has a much wider range as an actor than the role of Cora Crawley ever allowed her. Showcasing her talent must have been McGovern’s prime motivation of writing Ava, a play based on the biography Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations (2013). Ava is great as a showcase for McGovern. As a play about Ava Gardner, however, it leaves much to be desired.

Ava Gardner (1922-90) was a major Hollywood star in the 1950s, but people today can be forgiven for not quite knowing who she is. She did appear in several important movies like The Killers (1946), Show Boat (1951), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), On the Beach (1959), Seven Days in May (1964) and The Night of the Iguana (1964). Yet, she has never continued to fire the imagination of the general public like her contemporaries Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor. In 1988 Gardner, who was living in London, asked British journalist Peter Evans, to ghostwrite her autobiography because she needed the money. As she says in the play, “I either write the book or sell the jewels , and I’m kinda sentimental about the jewels”. Evans recorded interviews with her off and on from 1988 to 1990 when she suddenly cancelled the book because she was afraid her third ex-husband, Frank Sinatra, would take offense.

Yet, in 2013, after the deaths of both Gardner and Evans the book was published with the blessing of Gardner’s estate as The Secret Conversations. McGovern’s play takes much of Gardner’s dialogue directly from the book, but one of the main flaws of the play is the inordinate amount of time it spends on Evans. McGovern clearly intends the bland, unworldly writer to act as a foil to the vital, exciting former star, but Evans presence moves from being merely uninteresting to positively annoying as the show progresses. Evans’s scenes with Gardner alternate with scenes where Evans speaks into the auditorium to his unseen editor Ed, whose main interest in Evans’s book is not in Gardner but the dirt Gardner can dish on her three husbands – Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra.

For unknown reason, McGovern as playwright has decided to give the show a metatheatrical frame. McGovern has Evans begin the play but standing in front of the curtain pondering the question, “How to begin?” as if he were the playwright wondering how to begin the play he has written about interviewing Gardner. The conceit is unnecessary and takes too much time to establish. At the end of the show, assistant stage managers start taking the set apart, thus revealing what we’ve seen as a play, while the principal actors are still on stage. McGovern as Gardner walks down a red carpet towards us and suddenly becomes an image projected in the front curtain that has just dropped. It’s a nice effect, but it is not at all clear from the play what kind of image Gardner is supposed to project.

When Evans begins his interviews with Gardner, she has already suffered a stroke which as effectively ended her acting career. After a longish period where McGovern has the elder Gardner narrate her past, slightly hampered by stroke-related speaking difficulties, McGovern gives us flashbacks, signalled through Amith Chandrashaker abrupt lighting cues, where McGovern as younger versions of Gardner enacts scenes from the past. These flashbacks all involve Gardner’s ex-husbands with actor Aaron Costa Ganis, who plays Evans, acting the parts of all three. Although the elder Gardner does discuss her affair with Howard Hughes, there is no flashback regarding him.

The main peculiarity about McGovern’s script is that it is so preoccupied with the feisty relationship between Evans and Gardner that it shines little light on Gardner herself. McGovern has Gardner mention several of her movies but has her discuss only two of them. Concerning Show Boat, Gardner says how she was offended that the studio had Lena Horne dub Gardner’s singing the character Julie LaVerne, a woman of mixed race. There is no discussion whether Gardner had any opinion about propriety of a Caucasian woman like herself playing a mixed-race character. Concerning Mogambo (1953), all McGovern has Gardner say is that she was so pleased that director John Ford thought she was a good actor. There is no discussion of what Garnder thought about acting with a mostly drunken Clark Gable or what she thought of acting on location in Africa.

The near total lack of any discussion of Gardner’s acting or films is especially strange since McGovern has Gardner specifically ask Evans to stop quizzing her about her husbands and ask her about her career. Despite this request, McGovern’s play gives us no perspective on Gardner’s career. Indeed, the play follows the same line that the mercenary editor Ed feeds to Evans, namely that the public is only interested in what Gardner has to say about her ex-husbands. Even then, Gardner never reflects on why she continues to marry or sleep with men who treat her badly.

The play doesn’t even answer basic questions like “Why is Gardner even living in London?” or “Why does Gardner suddenly need money?” Given how uninformative the play is, our main interest is focussed on the performances themselves. McGovern is radiant as Gardner. From her very first words she banishes all notions of Cora Crawley. Everything is different – her accent, line delivery, gestures, posture. McGovern successfully depicts Gardner’s sudden shifts of mood both when playing the Gardner of 1988 and in playing her at three earlier points in time. McGovern traces Gardner’s growth from a naïve newcomer in Hollywood to a woman who has had enough of male control and is happy to live on her own even though she laments her loneliness. The script’s structure of flipping back and forth in time does have the negative effect that McGovern does not have the chance to develop the character of Gardner chronologically and thus give us a clearer view of what Gardner does (or does not) realize about herself and the Hollywood system as time passes.

Aaron Costa Ganis plays Evans as a bit of a pompous twit who wishes he could be writing a novel rather than ghostwriting an autobiography. It would be good if he could make Evans come off as a comic figure but in Ganis’s hands he becomes merely irritating. Ganis is able to make each of Gardner’s three husbands distinct. Partly this is because Ganis does fine impersonations of Rooney and Sinatra (few will be able to judge his Shaw impersonation). Partly this is because Ganis is able to highlight different dominant qualities in each – youthful eagerness in Rooney, creepy domination in Shaw and moral weakness in Sinatra.

While I was very happy to see McGovern on stage, I kept thinking how much better the experience would be if she were playing a meatier role in a better play. Because of its nonchronological structure, Ava is neither thrilling nor gripping because what little tension is created is immediately dissipated. Interest in Gardner is immediately countered by our lack of interest in Evans. Let’s hope we have another chance to see McGovern on stage in Toronto.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Elizabeth McGovern as Ava Gardner; Aaron Costa Ganis as Peter Evans; Elizabeth McGovern as Ava Gardner with Aaron Costa Ganis as Frank Sinatra in background. © 2025 Jeff Lorch.

For tickets visit: www.mirvish.com.